EON have just trebled my gas/ electric bill!

[hairymelons]

I've been with EON nearly 2 years. Was paying £50 a month for gas & electric the whole time, just got a letter today saying it's going up to £180!!!
I phoned them and they say the minimum they can take is £130 or I can go on pre-payment. They also said they had let me down and should have reviewed my payments a long time ago.
Is there anything I can do? It's a struggle to meet our bills already, this could tip us over the edge into serious difficulty.
Thanks

If they admit to having let you down, then ask to be be billed quarterly, and make sure you put enough aside to cover it. Ping it off on bank transfer and no need for prepayment.

Do you have arrears, and have they ever billed you for them or made you aware of them?

Thanks scaryteacher.
No arrears from missed payments, just what I owe as a result of my DD being set too low. Apparently I'm £500 in debit and using £117 worth per month. So if I go on quarterly bills I think I'd have to clear the £500 first which would probably involve selling my first born.
It just seems really unfair that they can cock up and as a result we're even more skint. EON, for example......

Fight fight fight them tooth and nail - we had this with them (when they were still Powergen) a few years back. They tried to refuse our offer to repay what was owed - we gave them a figure we could afford (offering one or 2 monthly payments at a slightly higher rate - then down to the figure we'd agreed between ourselves).

Initially they denied knolwedge of the phone call where they agreed to it and someone turned up to fit a prepayment meter. I told him to sod off (in slightly nicer words). And got back on the Phone to them. Was on teh phone for nearly an hour but finally go an agreement out of them.

First things first - have they got the correct readings? Secondly you need to work out a figure that you can realistically afford.

They're probably keep pushing the prepayment on you - and if it's anything like when they tried to push it on us even though they "only" wanted us to pay something like £4 a week towards the money owed the monthly figure was still going to be higher than what we could afford. (not to mention the fact that it was going to take years to pay it off like that).

You may find if you push them that they ask for an intial higher payment to clear some of it - is there any chance you can put it on a credit card or anything (obviously it's just transfering the debt elsewhere - but even with the interest being added I'd rather have longer to pay off a credit card and pay interest than have a utilities company chasing me), borrow money perhaps? If you can pay off a bit of a "chunk" in one go you may find they're more flexible.

Whatever you do - DON'T agree to something that you can't afford I can speak from experience to sa that having more letters chasing you for debts where you've "agreed" higher figures than you can afford isn't nice/.

Oh thank you, that's brilliant. I felt really uneasy about the conversation I had, they kept saying that it wouldn't work out any more expensive with a pre-payment meter and I'd only have to pay back £5 a week towards the debt. They were very vague about specific figures though.
Right, I'm going to get back on the phone to them!

agree with alwayslooking.
I had this years ago with another supplier. I'd been giving them regular meter readings but for some reason, they chose to ignore them and keep doing estimated as they seemed to think my meter readings were wrong as didn't tally with the last reading they had taken.
Eventually they realised that they had made an error on their system and suddenly wanted around £800 immediately. I argued this with them as they'd ignored my readings and if they'd used them I would not be in that situation. They eventually agreed that as they'd ignored my readings over an 18 month period they gave me 18 months to pay the 'arrears' and set a new more realistic monthly DD payment.

I can relate to this completely as Eon have just upped my bills to £135 per month. I am actually in the position that I will not put the heating on this winter until it is cleared. I am privately renting too so my rent is already high (although lowish for this area). Adding a massive electricity payment on top is hideous.

No wonder so many single parents don't work- the cost of living is so high that the wages wouldn't meet the bills in a lot of cases.

Hairy -you have probably already sorted this out but as long as you pay for what you are using (£117pm) and then an amount on top that you can afford to maintain it will be fine.

Can you afford the £130? If not then tell them that, tell them what you can afford and then stick to it. They prefer money coming in every month and reducing your debt than setting a figure too high that you can't afford and you stop paying.

I used to work for npower and every 1st quarter (jan, feb, mar) every quarterly paid bill would go out with a DD prompt to say "don't want to pay this whopping winter bill in one go after Christmas when you are skint? Stick it on a DD for a year" and then we would quote them their monthly DD.

Please don't go onto a prepayment meter, it is a PITA to top it up and keep the meter fed.

They cost more in the long run too in just normal cost per unit etc as they take a lot to maintain all the behind scenes stuff like the machines, training the operators, the phone lines that send the info from the terminals in the shops to the electricity company etc